Using Standard Templates To Build Product Training Courses Faster

One of our clients, a leading pharmaceutical company, wanted to impartproduct training to their sales representatives, through short e-learning modules, to increase their efficiency. Medical representatives face many problems while promoting their companies’ products to doctors. It’s a well-known fact that doctors are more knowledgeable about medicines than pharmaceutical sales representatives.

It was a big challenge for us to make the courses engaging and informative, so that theyhelp the salespeopleof the client acquire new skills and build their self-esteem. Right content will help the sales staff meet the current objectives and gain specific skills. It is fair to say that only a few sales staff members will be able to remember and apply the newly acquired knowledge.We first analyzed the entire content and listed out a few common topics that could be designed in the same way for all the producttraining modules. We first created an outline for each drug/ product and then designed standard templates for the slides. Here is the screenshot of an outline.

1. One common slide is “Product: Composition and Dosage”.The composition of each product is different,and we represented the composition of every product using icons.

2. Another common slide is “Product: Mode of Action”. Each drug has different modes of action .As the concept is highlytechnical, we used animations to help learners understand the subject. As all these modulesareiPad compatible, we used .swf files to create animations which were converted into the mp4 format and embedded into Storyline.

3. Another common slide is “Product: Pharmacokinetics”. Pharmacokinetics is a branch of pharmacology dedicated to determining the fate of drug administered. It is commonly divided into divided into Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism and Excretion (ADME). We suggested the click interactivity to explain the pharmacokinetics.

4. Finally comes the “Product: Indications and Contraindications”. We represented the useful and the harmful effects of the drug in various disease conditions using zoo-zoos.

Standardizing a few templates makes it easier for the e-learning designer/developer to understand and quickly process the content and ensure quality, which in turn makes the development faster.The use of animations, various icons and interactivities helpsteach technical content effectively and enables sales representatives to retain and apply the knowledge better. What do you think?